How Often Should I Clean My Air Ducts?

Air ducts are critical to delivering clean air to your home or commercial building. If your ducts are dirty, it’s just as effective as cleaning your dishes with a dirty rag. Dirty air ducts and filters will push more dirt, dust, and debris back into the air. This may not sound like a big deal, but inhaling particles can lead to new or worsening health issues, especially in people with allergies or asthma. Most of us tend to forget about air ducts, even if we regularly change our air filters. But dirty air ducts could be causing more problems than you realize. 

Do I Need to Get my Air Ducts Cleaned?

You may not have considered the role air ducts play in your home’s indoor air quality. So how often do your air ducts need to be inspected and cleaned for them to maintain high IAQ? The frequency with which you should schedule air duct cleaning depends on a few factors, but the National Duct Cleaners Association (NADCA) recommends cleaning your air ducts every 3 to 5 years.

What Factors Can Affect the Frequency with which my Ducts Need to be Cleaned?

A few things factor into establishing how often you should clean your duct systems. Every 3-5 years is a standard recommendation, but you may want to consider doing it more often depending on certain factors.

The Number of Residents in your Household

One of the most significant factors in determining how often you should get an air duct cleaning is the number of people and animals residing in your household. The more residents there are, the more dust and debris your air system must deal with. If you live in unit housing, there’s an even higher chance that cleaning your ductwork every 3-5 years won’t be enough. 

Allergy Season

If you are strongly affected by allergies or live somewhere with a high pollen or allergen count, you should decrease the time between air duct cleanings. Getting an air duct cleaning will reduce or temporarily eliminate any allergens accumulating in your home’s airflow systems.

Lower amounts of dust will also help reduce allergy symptoms and increase the efficiency of your heating and cooling system. When large quantities of dust get into your home, the return air that your HVAC system puts out has a minimal increase in quality compared to the air it took in. 

Signs of Mold

If you are experiencing signs of mold, that is a signal to get your air ducts looked at by professionals. Mold can present the opportunity for health issues to arise and further damage parts of your home. Even if you can’t see any signs of mold in your ducts, there could still be mold spores or clusters in less visible parts of the HVAC system or air conditioning unit. 

When you hire professional duct cleaning companies, they know what to look for regarding signs of mold and almost always offer a service to remove and eliminate the infestation. When mold lingers in your air ducts, no matter how often you clean your house, the mold will keep coming back from those spores. 

What Does a Duct Cleaning Service Look Like?

While every air duct cleaning company’s process will look slightly different, they’ll all have a similar general process. While a professional air duct cleaning may not seem necessary, you may be surprised at the level of expertise it requires. While your average cleaning service is very talented when cleaning up surface-level messes, they probably won’t have the skills needed to clean ducts properly.

Professional air duct cleaning services specialize in this process and have unique tools to get the job done correctly. Most average cleaning companies don’t have access to these tools, making their processes less effective. 

When you call a professional duct cleaning service like AdvantaClean, you can be sure you’ll receive an extensive cleaning process that sanitizes your ducts thoroughly and will keep them working optimally. We use industrial tools to remove dirt, dust, debris, allergens, and pet dander that have entered your airflow and duct systems so that you can breathe more easily.We also work with our customers to set up a duct cleaning schedule that works for you. No one should have to rearrange their lives just to get a breath of fresh air. We also offer other services like duct sanitization, which reduces your risk of future mold and mildew infestations. 

If it’s too late for that and you already have mold or mildew, we can also help with that. AdvantaClean offers a wide variety of mold- and mildew-related services for you to choose from. We help with moisture removal, water damage restoration, fire damage cleanup, radon testing, and natural disaster aftermath. 

No matter what you need to be cleaned or restored, call the professionals at AdvantaClean for a free quote today!